The Excel Web Part error on the SharePoint site is: "An error has occurred. Please contact your system administrator"

When looking in the application log on the server I saw:

Event ID: 5226 - Excel Calculation Service
Unable to create or access workbook cache at C:\Windows\TEMP\Excel server\FileCache\SharedServices1-942760090\Ranges. Excel Services is unable to function without a workbook cache.

Googling the error will present you with posts to check that the disk is not full, that the account running the application pool tied to Excel Services has appropriate permissions to TEMP and to try restarting the Excel Services service. Great places to start, but I found my issue was much simpler:

It turns out previous to the error I ran CCleaner on the server, which goes through the system and removes "unneeded" files...which included some of the subfolders in temp. I did have all the structure down to C:\Windows\TEMP\Excel server\FileCache\SharedServices1-942760090\ but missing subfolders. It seems that it's OK to delete all of TEMP (it will simply recreate the cache), but if the subfolders are missing Excel Services gets confused.

So browse to the directory in question under \FileCache\[SSP Path Name]\ you should create 3 subfolders: \Ranges, \Charts, and \SavedWorkbooks.

I recently got the below error message across all of my sites in a farm; every web part was displaying this message instead of the content. Very scary:

Web Part Error: One of the properties of the Web Part has an incorrect format. Windows SharePoint Services cannot deserialize the Web Part. Check the format of the properties and try again.

You'll quickly find the following MS KB article for the error message: KB 826786.

It boils down to SharePoint needing to work out of the WinDir\Temp and WinDir\System32\logfiles directories. Which may be a permissions issue as noted in the KB article.

This can also be caused by your virus scan software. For example, McAfee's On-Access Scanner may be blocking executables from being written to the Temp directory: SharePoint writes .dlls to temp which will be blocked, which would be blocked from functioning and cause the noted error.

So in short, if you are getting the above error message it might be a good first step to disable your virus scan and see if the message goes away, if it does work from there to readjust your virus scan settings.

From the SharePoint Team Blog:

During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed.

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This one might scare you pretty good the first time you see it. When you launch IIS Manager either on a MOSS WFE or remotely connecting to a WFE nothing populates under your server name in the left pane: not even showing folders for App Pools, Web Sites or Web Service Extensions.

This is fairly common (haven't had a chance to see if it was fixed in SP2). It looks to be a memory leak of some sort as it seems to happen over time.

Luckily the fix is very simple: simply restart "Windows SharePoint Services Search" and "Windows SharePoint Services Timer". No iisreset is needed afterwards from all the cases I've seen.

NOTE: Reader Richard suggests the hotfix KB946517 may resolve the issue. I will try shortly and confirm. Thanks Richard!

I've had several people ask me about this one especially now that in 3.0/MOSS there is the top nav bar and breadcrumb trails. I'll have to give props to Todd Bleeker for the steps on this one.

The process uses a Content Editor Web Part to inject some CSS and alter the page and hide the Quick Launch bar. You won't need to know CSS though, the snippet is provided below.

1. Go to your site you want to hide the Quick Launch
2. Click Site Actions > Edit Page
3. Click the Add a Web Part in any section
4. Put a "Content Editor Web Part" on the page
5. Click "open the tool pane" on the new web part.
6. Click "Source Editor" and paste the below in the editor window:

7. Click Save.
8. In the tool pane expand Appearance and change the title to read "Hide Quick Launch"
9. Still in the tool pane under Appearance select NONE for the chrome type.
10. Click OK to get out of the tool pane and exit Edit Mode.

The "Title" column comes default on any list you are going to create in SharePoint, it's also by default a "Single line of text" type. This introduces problems if a) You don't want a Title column or b) you want that Title column to be a lookup or another column type.

If you have searched on how to remove the Title column from a SharePoint list you probably found a few articles on how to edit the "Item" content type to hide the Title column. This solves your issue if you just want to solve a) above. But you'll notice if you try to create a new column named "Title" with a different column type, say Lookup, you'll get an error that Title still exists.

I will quickly run through resolving both a) and b) if you still want "Title" but want it to be a different column type.

1. Go to Settings > List Settings > Advanced Settings on the list in question
2. Click YES to allow management of content types and click OK
3. You will now see the "Item" content type under "Content Types", click "Item"
4. Click on the Title column
5. Select the radio button to make "Title" Hidden and click OK.
6. (Optional if you want to make a new "Title" column under a different column type) Click Title again and then click "Edit column in new window". In that new window change "Title" to anything else, make sure "Require that this column..." is set to NO. And click OK. Close the new window and click OK on your main window.
7. You will now see Title is no longer there when you click "New"
8. You will want to go through any views you have and remove any references to the know hidden column. You can also now create a new column, name it "Title" and give it any column type you want.

So I upgraded my blog 2 weeks ago, promised more updates, and gave you none.

I've been spending time brushing up on my all-around MOSS knowledge for several reasons including taking the MCTS SharePoint exam (70-630), which I took and passed with a nearly perfect score earlier today.

What I want to touch on briefly today is the move from Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint. Once upon a time Exchange public folders were one of the best ways to store shared calendar events and a quick and easy way for users to store emails, files and contacts that could also be easily made available for offline use.

With the release of SharePoint 3.0 there is now no real advantage to using Exchange public folders, with all the functionality you see in public folders improved upon with the SharePoint features: email enabled document libraries, alerting, Outlook 2007 integration including data made available offline. Microsoft itself is endorsing SharePoint as its collaboration platform to replace public folders in the future.

If you are a heavy user of Public Folders there is no rush to migrate off to SharePoint as MS will continue to support public folders through at least the next major release after Exchange 2007. But small to medium implementations of public folders may want to look at migrating their content to SharePoint.

There are currently no migration utilities available from Microsoft to migrate existing public folder content to SharePoint, but there are several 3rd party apps that will make the conversion painless (eg: AvePoint, Quest). I recently demoed the Quest Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

The Quest utility provides many options I didn't even think about including linking the old Public Folder in the Outlook client to the new location where the data lives on SharePoint, even displaying the SharePoint page directly in Outlook. Once you have the software installed and the appropriate permissions where they need to be, the migration wizard steps you through choosing a target Public folder (calendar, folder, or folder tree) and a destination. There are options regarding how you want to handle the permissions and whether you want this to be a recurring schedule that keeps updating the SharePoint site when items are added to the Outlook side or if you simply want to delete the public folder for Outlook altogether.

Moving to SharePoint gives you an easier tool to administer, you can probably use existing team and project sites, and frees up some space on your mailstores: they always have a knack for running out of space, don't they?

I have upgraded my blog software and am still playing with the layout a bit think I have finalized the layout. I also added a new IM app on the side bar, try it out!

In addition I am hoping to add more content shortly; I have compiled a list of items I want to blog about so look for those over the next few days.

I am excited to see in the logs I am getting a lot of hits for searches on errors messages and issues and hopefully my posts are helping you out. Feel free to hit the comment button on a post and leave your feedback.

After a recent SharePoint migration from WSS2.0 to MOSS (database migration) I had one site that was giving the following error (screenshot below) when clicking "Fill out this form" in an Infopath form library:

(click thumbnail for full image)
The document could not be created. The required application may not be installed installed properly, or the template for this document library cannot be opened.

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SharePoint MOSS 2007 has introduced a great feature set in My Site and My Links. Unfortunately there seem to be some kinks in keeping the My Links in sync so they actually show you all the sites you are a member of.

I recently did a WSS2.0 to MOSS2007 database migration. The new server had MOSS installed well before the migration and it was used as a dev instance before moving the production databases over to it.

Here is the problem: after moving the prod DBs over and renaming the new server with it's PROD name all the My Links still pointed to sites using the dev url. Even new sites I added myself to would not show up under My Links.

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